- IN THIS REPORT
Readers will learn about important state-level developments and various new documents available from the Blum Center, and will encounter the Editor's View on the virtues of love and justice as the core of school choice justification.
FLORIDA
Representative Stephen R. Wise (R-Jacksonville) has drafted
a school choice proposal to be introduced in the Florida legislature in
1996. The "Private School Tuition Assistance Program" would create a five
year pilot program in selected counties, allowing up to 5% of students
enrolled in public schools to receive scholarships that could be redeemed
at any private school. Low-income families would be eligible for further
assistance according to need. Budget savings would be matched by private
contributions and used the following year to provide tuition assistance
to existing private school students. Also working on the proposal is Representative
Carlos Valdez (R-Miami), a longtime supporter of school choice in Florida.
The proposal is gaining bi-partisan support and has the blessings of the
Education Commissioner, Frank Brogan. (Information has been provided by
Gary Lieffers, Legislative Assistant to Rep. Wise.)
MAINE
In the Maine Senate this year, Legislative Document 1495,
"An Act to Establish the Comprehensive School Choice Program in the State,"
was introduced by Senator Phil Harriman and co-sponsored by a number of
prominent Senators, including Senators Hanley, the chair of the Taxation
Committee; Hathaway, the chair of the Appropriations Committee; and several
members of the Joint Finance Committee. A lengthy hearing was conducted
by the Education Committee on May 23 for LD 1495, during which a number
of individuals and groups from the state voiced their support for the bill.
Because of the Committee's pre-occupation with other matters, the bill
was held over until the next legislative session, which will occur in approximately
six months. (Information provided by Frank Heller of the Maine School Choice
Coalition, from a 06/23/95 news release)
OHIO (ANOTHER
SNOWBALL DOWN THE HILL)
On June 30, Governor George V. Voinovich signed into
law a two-year budget package for the state which creates a $5.25 million
pilot voucher program in Cleveland, effective in September, 1996. On June
23, the House-Senate Conference Committee approved the budget package.
Although the voucher program was greatly revised since its introduction,
it will nonetheless allow an estimated 2,000 Cleveland parents to redeem
vouchers at private or religious schools. State money will provide parents
with no more than 75% of the $2,500 voucher amount ($1,875). The difference
($625) will come from "donors or other government entities." Low-income
families, as defined by the superintendent, may receive all but $250 of
the total voucher amount. (Plain Dealer, 06/25/95)
When the voucher plan was first introduced this year in the legislature by Gov. Voinovich, it was intended to provide vouchers to a number of school districts. On April 6 the Ohio House voted to limit the program to Cleveland only, and limit the amount of state funds that would be provided to only 75% of the total voucher amount. The plan was initially rejected by the Senate, but was later revived in the House-Senate Conference Committee, which ultimately voted in its favor, giving further aid to low-income parents. However, while the plan was originally to be overseen by a proposed Commission on School Choice, the Committee decided that the program would be overseen by the state superintendent instead. (See Freedom Reports #20 & 22; Education Week, 06/14/95; Plain Dealer, 06/25/95)
In order to better facilitate the application process for the new voucher program, Ohio choice activist and business leader David Brennan is currently forming a 501(c)(3) organization in Cleveland dedicated to that purpose—HOPE for Cleveland's Children. Information on the application process can be obtained by contacting HOPE at 7609 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44103; 216-391-HOPE.
This crucial Ohio development, added to the Wisconsin events reported in Freedom Report #23 and the current issue, means that there are two school choice snowballs now traveling downhill, gaining mass and momentum as they go.
PENNSYLVANIA
As close as Pennsylvania's legislature came to including
a limited scholarship plan in its budget package this year, it recessed
on June 29 without doing so. (For a fuller summary of the Governor's voucher
provision, see Educational Freedom Report #19.) On June 16, the
voucher component of Governor Ridge's budget was losing 95-106 when House
Speaker Matthew Ryan struck the vote, stating that some of the House members'
votes were not appearing in the tally as a result of a mechanical malfunction.
However, two hours later the Governor announced that he was conceding the
plan's defeat, because voucher proponents had "lost fair and square." The
vote had already been postponed on two previous occasions. (Philadelphia
Inquirer, 06/09/95, 06/15/95, 06/17/95)
While securing 20 Democratic House votes, the school choice effort lost 27 Republicans, and thus, the vote. Rather than trying to force the vote one more time in the legislature, the Governor suggested that he would work on the choice package over the remainder of the summer and possibly re-introduce it in the fall. The legislature reconvenes in September. (Patriot News, 06/17/95)
WISCONSIN
On June 29 the Wisconsin legislature gave its approval
to the provision in this year's budget package which will expand the Milwaukee
Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to include religious schools. MPCP will
also be expanded to include more students as of fall, 1995. Governor Tommy
G. Thompson will sign the package into law very soon. For more details
on the expansion of MPCP, see Freedom Report #23.
Milwaukee Mayor John O. Norquist, a longtime supporter of school choice, considers the expansion of MPCP a victory for Milwaukee parents: "School choice empowers parents, so the expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is great news for those parents." Furthermore, Norquist believes that the expansion of MPCP will not only give parents more freedom, it will help to improve Milwaukee's public schools. "School choice will not hurt public schools. In fact, I predict public schools will successfully compete for students. And, ultimately, that means all our schools will be doing a better job of educating our children." (06/28/95 memorandum from Mayor Norquist's office)
Both opponents and proponents of school choice are preparing for a court battle. Chris Ahmuty, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and supported by the national ACLU office, has threatened to sue the State of Wisconsin as soon as Thompson signs the budget bill into law. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 07/06/95) Proponents of school choice, however, have not waited to plan their strategy. On July 6, a group of school choice advocates met in Milwaukee for a strategy session, planning the defense of MPCP's expansion. The group included Governor Tommy Thompson, Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr and Clint Bolick, an attorney from the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., who has been involved in school choice litigation for years. Both Bolick and Ahmuty think that the dispute over MPCP's expansion might well be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 07/07/95)
Milwaukee schools intending to participate in the program must send a letter of intention to the Department of Public Instruction. As of July 1, 72 schools had already applied, including the 12 non-sectarian schools that participated in the program last year. Due to the great number of schools interested in the program, the deadline was extended to July 15. For parents who wish to apply to the program, there is no deadline for this academic year. (Wisconsin State Journal 07/04/95)
And, finally, from Wisconsin, this note: in the January 20, 1995, issue of the Educational Freedom Report (#17), we mentioned the growing interest in and sympathy toward school choice among some more liberal Jewish groups, which have traditionally opposed school choice. A most pertinent recent article appeared recently in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. The June 30 article, written by Milwaukee businessman and philanthropist Martin F. Stein, is titled, "Parochial School Choice Would Help Kids, With No Harm to Constitution." The article explains that while school choice is no panacea, in no way could it hurt, and in no way does it cross the church-state line. Indeed, school choice introduces into the failing Milwaukee system a much-needed dose of "healthy competition." Stein urges the Jewish community to support parental choice, because in doing so, they would fulfill their obligations as the "world's social conscience." These comments once again confirm that school choice, a parent-serving policy, is naturally attractive to a wide diversity of constituents, when they have clear vision.
Announcements
¨ A Blum Center Order
Form has been enclosed in this issue of the Educational Freedom Report
as a way of making the listing of frequently requested materials available
to our new readers.
¨ Information has been received regarding a new organization, the Association of American Educators, which is a non-partisan, national professional trade association and acts as a non-union alternative for American teachers. For further information, contact Executive Director Gary Beckner at 1-800-704-7799, or write to him at 26012 Marguerite Pkwy, Mission Viejo, CA 92692.
¨ Brother Bob Smith, Capuchin monk, former parole officer, and current Principal of Milwaukee's Messmer High School, a private school on the edge of Milwaukee's inner city, has been speaking out on behalf of educational choice during the events leading up to the recent expansion of Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to include religious schools. In a June 13 letter to the editor of The New Republic, Bro. Bob reaffirms his support of MPCP, stating that "73% of African Americans in the city support the School Choice program. I am one of them. We support the program not because it was created by a political party, but because it empowers poor parents to become active agents of change in their children's education." In a June 30 opinion article published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bro. Bob encouraged legislators and other elected officials to support MPCP expansion, posing the question, "Why not let some of those dollars ($400 million per year devoted to the support of Milwaukee Public Schools) follow children to private schools chosen by their parents where their children can get a good education at a lower cost?"
¨ Apparently public school teachers in Milwaukee agree in practice with Bro. Bob about the desirability of sending their children to private schools even as their unions oppose true school choice. A recent study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute alerts that 33% of the children of Milwaukee Public School teachers are in private schools. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 07/18/95) Denis P. Doyle, in his article entitled, "Lessons in Hypocrisy," published June 13 in the Wall Street Journal, states that "in troubled urban areas, public school teachers are significantly more likely than the general public to enroll their children in private schools: In Boston, 44.6% of public teachers use private schools [vs. 28.9% of all parents]; in Chicago, 36.3% (vs. 26.6% of all parents); in Cleveland, 39.7% (vs. 25.2%); in New York, 27.9% (vs. 24.6%); in Grand Rapids, Mich., 41.1% (vs. 27.3%); and in San Francisco, 36.7% (vs. 30.1%). Controlling for income, the figures are even more striking: Public school teachers earning more than $70,000 a year are three and even four times as likely as the public at large to use private schools... The question is, why would they want to deny to millions of low-income parents the very school choice that they exercise? Their answer seems to be: What's good enough for teachers isn't good enough for ordinary people. That's a terrible lesson to teach."
¨ The organization Citizens for Educational Freedom has made available copies of its proposed EDUCARD, which may be of interest to school choice advocates around the country. For further information, please contact Sister Renee Oliver, at the National Office, Suite One, 927 S. Walter Reed Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22204, 703-486-8311, FAX - 703-486-3160.
Legislative Proposals
¨ The Blum Center now
has received and makes available to our readers copies of Florida Rep.
Steve Wise's draft proposal (see FLORIDA above), Maine Sen. Phil Harriman's
LD 1495 (see MAINE above), and Oregon Rep. John Schoon's HB 3464 (see Freedom
Report #22, June 16, 1995).
Surveys, Reports, &
Studies
¨ The Organisation Internationale
Pour Le Developpement De La Liberte D'Ensignement (or OIDEL) in Geneva
has just announced the release of its 1995 Report On the State of Educational
Freedom in the World. This report is the result of two years research
performed by a multi-disciplinary group, under the auspices of OIDEL. It
examines the state of educational liberty in over sixty countries around
the world. The report is available only in French, at a price of
$15 per copy. To order copies of the report, send orders to this address:
OIDEL - 32, rue de l'Athenee - GENEVA Switzerland.
¨ What do top American high school students think about the safety of their learning environments? The publisher of Who's Who Among American High School Students has recently issued the results of a survey of 3,177 "A" and "B" students which shows that 12% consider schools to be unsafe, compared with only 7% who held that opinion in 1971. (New York Times, 06/15/95)
- Freedom Report readers know well that the smoke
screens enveloping school choice discussions make such discussions difficult.
Educational finance monopoly (EFM) really cannot be defended in objective
categories — who wants frontally to argue for monopoly and against
parents' rights? As a result, those who want to protect EFM often rely
on what are diversions, red herrings which invite the curious away from
the real path to reform of school funding.
One such distraction involves the merging of two entirely different ideas: parental freedom via school choice without financial penalty, on the one hand; and "privatization and markets," on the other. Enemies of school choice may welcome such a confusion because they imagine that "privatization and markets" can be used as devil words, able to frighten parents and other citizens of good will, as in: "'School choice' equals 'privatization and markets' equals 'exploitation of your children for somebody else's profit.'"
There are, no doubt, school choice advocates who desire it because of a general disposition toward markets as superior to monopoly. Recognizing today's school funding method as the educational finance monopoly (EFM) it is, and beginning with a general presumption that markets work better than monopoly, they may simply infer that school choice would be better than EFM. For such people, it could be said, school choice would be a derivative of a preceding conviction about the superiority of markets. There are many motives which prompt people to support school choice, and a conviction about "market superiority" is one of them.
But it has little or nothing to do with what appears to motivate most advocates of and workers for school choice. In my experience, most school choice advocates, and parents overwhelmingly, are motivated by a strong conviction that parental freedom is prevented by EFM, and that the great virtues of love and justice, which should dominate and drive schooling, are obstructed by EFM. I do not mean that these are the dominant terms used in the struggle for school choice. But I do mean they are the dominant realities of that struggle.
The logical bedrock of school choice theory is that the love of parents and guardians for their children is a better guide to the educational welfare of those children than will be the attentions of an inevitably self-serving monopolistic school bureaucracy. Most parents, most of the time, want and will actively seek that welfare. This is a minimalist, not a utopian perspective. They will do this out of a natural love — i.e., a desire to do for the other — for the child. In order for these parents to act on this love and concern, they require feasible educational alternatives, or school choice. If they have no choices, they cannot act on their concern. Seen from this most basic perspective, interest in a range of options, or a "market," then, is a derivative of the prior love and concern.
As to justice — the virtue of right proportions, of ensuring for people what is due them — I mean simply this: society fully expects, even demands, that parents accept and discharge responsibility for the nurturing of the child's welfare. That welfare is seen to extend to the child's physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral well-being. But under EFM society turns around, in effect, and says: "Of course we hold our parents responsible for the child's welfare, including educational and moral welfare. But we will not empower you accordingly. Indeed, we will impede your efforts, because we will put you in a financial vise — rising school taxes, on one side, and rising independent school tuitions, on the other — which will make it impossible for most of you to choose your child's educational environment." That is injustice, a breaking of true proportion between what society expects and what it enables.
Thus, a wounded sense of justice, and frustration over the barriers to love's natural course, are the basic motives for most seekers after school choice. Those same motives will work against any undue exploitation by "profiteers." For most school choice advocates, "markets and privatization," though necessary if choice is to be real, are not the end sought but are simply derivative corollaries of the love and justice which precede them.n
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The Blum Center grants full permission for all of its documents to be copied, in part or in whole, to extend the reach of the Center's messages and information. We appreciate it when our readers keep us apprised of state and national developments in the area of school choice, particularly legislative developments. Any Blum Center documents not available on our web page may be obtained by contacting us by telephone, fax, or mail. Virgil C. Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education |
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